More And More Americans Are Starting To Believe Earth Is Flat

What I find interesting is how the rational guardians of bourgeois society – i.e. its educational establishments – never factor in the obvious weaknesses, inconsistencies and deadly inequalities of the capitalist system they serve. Their mistaken assumption is that science and rational thought belong to the middle class. Middle class universities must be seen to be pushing forward research whilst never allowing that research to be critical of capitalism. Albert Einstein famously disagreed with this blinkered approach. The limited capitalist mind-set inherently limits the search horizon by linking every project to ‘profitability’. No perceived monetary profit and the suggested research direction never gets off the ground. This is why the USSR, with limited material resources, was able to scientifically out produce the US in the area of science (the US was forced to compete in an area involving massive expense but no monetary profit), and why Communist China – unhindered by notions of profit – is expanding its ‘Socialist’ science so far beyond the US capabilities, that the US Establishment cannot compete in any meaningful way. What has these observations to do with conspiracy theory? The above ‘bourgeois’ article points out that many ordinary people believe in alternative ideas and opinions because of their lack of formal education. In typical US-style, this observation is packaged as being the fault of the individuals concerned, when in reality it is a glaring fault in the capitalist system of the USA. Capitalism favours the few in society, and disempowers the many. Ordinary people may distrust the Authorities in the US and imagine or assume all kinds of bizarre counter-narratives, but just like their bourgeois over-lords, by and large they too fail to condemn the capitalist system within which they exist. (Such people are so disempowered that do not even possess the cognitive ability to condemn it). Instead, alternative intellectual power-bases are sought as a means to replace mainstream understanding.

This is due to the elitism that defines the bourgeois education system. It very much defines itself through whom it excludes from the knowledge it possesses – and that invariably involves the poor working class. In the US however, following nearly 100 years of anti-Socialist brain-washing, the American Proletariat is nolonger able to understand or relate to genuine Scientific Socialism. Instead, it remains in a morass of isolated individualism, which mimics the bourgeois education system, whilst remaining permanently ‘detached’ from it. The point that is being missed within this situation is that science does not exclusively belong to the bourgeoisie or the capitalism it produces. Although it is true that the bourgeoisie monopolise academic knowledge, it does not ‘own’ it. Logical and rational thinking began centuries prior to the rise of the bourgeoisie (and modern capitalism), and can be seen in ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, India and China, not to mention the early European cultures. The bourgeois system is very much a modern, but albeit ‘stubborn’, development in the history of humanity’s search for profit and accumulation of political power.

The Lumpen Proletariat in the US, operating as it does through a ‘false consciousness’, falsely believes that it is ‘standing up’ to the bourgeoisie (which is limited to notions of the distant and faceless ‘Authorities’, but seldom the business structures around the workers), whilst in effect generating bourgeois mirroring structures within its own ranks, that are slightly out of focus, prone to illogical or erroneous thinking, and tending toward theistic theology. This ‘off-science’ approach is interpreted as ’empowering’ and as a legitimate view of reality. This position assumes that mainstream science is ‘wrong’, and that reality must be different to what the text books say it is. Interestingly, it is not that governments do not lie – they must assuredly do – or that science is not driven and directed by commercial interests (it definitely is) – but rather that the disempowered working class in the US does not possess the ability to claim legitimate science as its own, and develop a ‘Socialist’ variant that understands the ‘class’ basis of the historical accumulation of facts and figures. Science can be used to serve and empower the masses, but within capitalist countries it is used to further exploit and oppress the working class. If the mind remains ‘inverted’ and unable to perceive reality as it is, then it does not matter whether you know the Earth is round, or believe it is flat. Either way there is no real understanding.